The history of work is of interest not only to historians. The author of this book, John W. Budd, is an economist who has published extensively on human resources and labour, and holds a chair in industrial relations at the University of Minnesota. Even if the object of the book “is not a historical narrative on concepts of work”, Budd's intention is to integrate “various philosophical traditions” as well as “rich intellectual conceptions of work found across the social and behavioral sciences” (p. 4).
The fundamental idea of this book is that the concept of work has been interpreted in many different ways, each with its own justification but each, in turn, one-sided and thus somehow inadequate. Only the acknowledgment of multiple perspectives and a process of weighing them against each other do justice to the social significance and complexity of work. The author does not explicitly state to whom the book is addressed, but in numerous sections he makes it clear that he is writing not only for a general readership but also for readers who deal with concepts of work in their professional life: social scientists, government officials dealing with social policy, business and trade-union leaders, judges dealing with labour law, et al.
In order to bring out the multifarious meanings of work, Budd constructs ten perspectives that are in his view “key conceptualizations of work”, both in intellectual traditions as well as in recent discourses: work as a curse, as freedom, as a commodity, as occupational citizenship, as disutility, as personal fulfilment, as a social relation, as caring for others, as identity, and as service. Each of these ten conceptualizations represents a chapter of ten to twenty pages. The roots of this division are obviously in the European history of ideas, and, indeed, Budd derives support for these arguments from the familiar and regularly cited secondary literature on concepts of work in Western history. Quotations from non-Western sources strewn in occasionally open up a global perspective, though this is not developed systematically.
The historical perspective plays different roles in different chapters. In the first (work as a curse) and in the tenth (work as service), the author looks back to Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian intellectual traditions, and in the second chapter (work as freedom) to seventeenth-century British liberalism, in particular to John Locke. These sections are where the book is least convincing, and in the discussions of these topics, historians have already developed more multifaceted perspectives. In particular, the author seems not to be interested in the historical context and the social backgrounds of the various thoughts of work.
All the other chapters are dominated by labour discourses in industrializing and industrial societies up to the present day. In these chapters, Budd most effectively goes beyond previously published literature by giving extensive consideration to recent discourses in the social and behavioural sciences. Conceptualizations of work in economics, sociology, psychology, industrial relations, etc. constitute the basis of the respective chapters on work as identity, fulfilment, disutility, and so on. This is indubitably the book's strong point. Very useful references to literature and generally accepted opinion of researchers in various fields are to be found in the text and footnotes. An introduction and a conclusion complete the book, which thereby offers a brief, compact, and well-written introduction to historical and contemporary structures of discourses on work although, from a historian's point of view, on the basis of outmoded concepts of intellectual history.
